FBI: It'll be tough identifying Burr Oak remains

FBI officials said today they held out little hope of identifying the remains of all of the bodies found at Burr Oak Cemetery as they began the arduous process of tracking down desecrated graves and locating possibly hundreds of bodies that were dug up and dumped.

The FBI set up a mobile command center truck at the Alsip cemetery this morning. About 20 FBI agents and 10 investigators from the Cook County sheriff's office began combing the area which they termed a crime scene, FBI Spokesman Ross Rice said at a press conference outside of the cemetery gates.

Unlike previous disasters where names and identities of survivors were available to compare DNA samples from bodies, the cemetery records at Burr Oak are in such disarray they don't know who was buried there, Rice said.

"It may not be possible to identify the remains ... in a perfect world, yes we would like to identify every remain and bring closure to the families," said Rice. "Here we don't know who's been unearthed and who was buried here based on the records.''

Among the FBI Investigators is a forensic anthropologist from the FBI's lab at Quantico, Va. Investigators began cataloging the remains found in a 1,600-square-foot by 1,200-square-foot area of the cemetery.

They began by breaking down the area into different grids and then removing debris and weeds from the area. Flags and ropes have been placed throughout the cemetery to aid the grid search.

Tuesday morning, sheriff's officers and other employees, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, will canvass the entire cemetery, according to sheriff's spokesman Steve Patterson.

The sheriff's office is also using people sentenced to community service to clean tombstones and cemetery grounds, "not only because it's the right thing to do, since it appears much of the cemetery was neglected, but to also assist in our documenting of each grave site," Patterson said.

No remains have been moved yet, but remains are scattered throughout the area, some visible to the naked eye, Rice said. He said the role of the FBI is to catalog the information to be used by prosecutors in a criminal proceedings.

"It's going to take a long time,'' Rice said.

Sheriff's officials say the cemetery will be closed to the public for at least the rest of the week but could reopen next week.